Friday, May 29, 2015

Who saw you on your way to work today? Even if you didn't see a soul, chances are, no matter where you live and work, someone did, or could, spot you, via one or more cameras monitoring intersections, store fronts, schools (not to mention your museum's own video feeds).

London probably takes the prize for most closely surveilled city, with 1 camera for every 14 people (422,000 total). On my way to work this morning (via foot & Metro), I counted 26 cameras positioned to catch my smiling face--and those are only the ones I could spot. Here in Washington, DC, police only have about 90 cameras themselves, but they have access to video from over 300 private cameras belonging to local businesses. Metro has about 6,000 cameras and there are an additional 30,000 in DC public schools, Welcome to the surveillance society, one in which you will have no reasonable expectation of remaining unseen outside your home. (Where Google's street view camera might catch you in your front yard. Hopefully they remember to blur the image later.) Until recently we were granted at least a thin veil of privacy by the sheer volume to data one would have to sift through to actually track anyone in particular. Enter Jenq-Neng Hwang, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. His algorithms can recognize people by general shape, pattern and appearance, matching images across separate video feeds to track an individual from place to place. With this technology, only legislative barriers to mining those feeds (and perhaps Adam Harvey's Stealth Wear) stand between us and a "digital panopticon" of ubiquitous observation.Your Futurist Friday assignment: watch this video about Hwang's work (3 1/2 minutes) and consider:

How do you feel about the trade-offs between security and privacy if Hwang's algorithms are put to widespread use?

Should technology like this only be used forensically (to investigate after a crime is committed) or does it have a legitimate place in crime prevention as well? (Shades of Minority Report.)

What private (non-governmental) applications can you imagine for this technology?

How could the ability to track individuals throughout museum space (indoors or out) assist your work, and what concerns does would this raise? (I threw you a softball there for that last question--perhaps a better Q would be, how long before people don't even notice, or care?)

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

I love museum podcasts.
I love assembling Dispatches from the Future of Museums each week. So I was very
pleased to be invited to combine these passions by contributing a segment
to a new podcast exploring digital learning in museums. Especially as the
invite came from Barry Joseph (aka Mooshme), my go-to blog source for commentary on the use of Minecraft, augmented
reality, digital badging, games design and 3D printing in museum education. Here’s an introduction to "Object-Oriented" from Barry and his
co-hosts, Rik Panganiban and Eve Gaus. Enjoy!

There’s a bit of a not-so-secret, secret when attending
professional development conferences: the best conversations happen outside the
formal panels and presentations. Instead, they take place in those
uncomfortable giant armchairs in the hotel lobby, or in the lingering moments
after a panel has wrapped up. The question always is, how to meaningfully
continue these conversations after the conference has finished and everyone has
returned home. Launching this week is Object-Oriented,
a new podcast that explores museums as innovation spaces for digital
learning. Born out of a desire to continue those armchair conversations, Object-Oriented is a space to think,
argue and converse with each other on what the future digital learning in
museums looks like.

We three museum educators—Rik Panganiban (Senior Manager of
Digital Learning at the California Academy of Sciences), Eve Gaus
(Digital Learning Manager at The Field Museum), and Barry Joseph
(Associate Director of Digital Learning at the American Museum of Natural History)—launched this
podcast to examine emerged and emerging issues in digital learning and
discusses how museums function in this digital space, particularly in regard to
youth programming. In the first episode, we explore the idea of the digital
lens and whether it distracts from a visitor’s learning experience at the
museum or whether it extends the experience and allows the visitor to engage on
a deeper level. Using examples from educational programs run at our own museums
and others, we debate what, if any, role the digital lens has in museums.

Don’t miss the concluding segment of the podcast where we have
a “News From The Future” segment, with guest Elizabeth Merritt, Founding
Director of the Center for the Future of Museums, American Alliance of Museums,
where we explore future trends in digital learning. Future episodes of the show
will include an exploration of game based learning and teaching with
scientists.

Friday, May 22, 2015

Much of the time futures work is about foreseeing, and avoiding, the worst possible outcomes. Rising seas lap at the toes of our communities (and sometimes our front steps), technology spawns ever more sophisticated ways to invade our privacy, the economic premise of nonprofit status seems increasingly shaky.
Sometimes dark (and depressingly plausible) scenarios of the future are just too much.
Sometimes I need to remind myself that futuring is about seeing the best possibilities, and working to make them true. This week's inspiration was yesterday's successful completion of a cargo run to the International Space Station by the SpaceX Dragon--a commercial spacecraft that SpaceX founder Elon Musk sees as one step in the road to a human Mars colony.
So, your Futurist Friday assignment: watch--full screen--3 min and 50 seconds of awesome.

And if you think this film envisions the impossible, remember that Musk named the SpaceX craft after Puff the Magic Dragon--because sometimes fairy tales can come true, especially if we use them to inspire children. (BTW, I will award points to anyone who identifies the film narrator before the credits roll. :)Have you got a go-to shot of optimistic inspiration about the future (video clip, quote, film, short story, pic)? Please share.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Here’s something I’ve been wondering about: are social
service and cultural nonprofits really the same species? Sure, we're united by
our 501(c)3 tax-exempt status, but beyond that, what's our family resemblance,
and is it enough to unite us behind shared values for our sector?

We do come together over certain issues. For example, the
Overhead Myth Campaign launched by
GuideStar, Charity Navigator and BBB Wise Giving Alliance. That PR and advocacy
project is trying to undermine the conventional wisdom operating budget spent on “overhead” (e.g., administration,
fundraising) is somehow wasteful, and the lower that spending is, the better. Ironically, this benchmark originated in the same watchdog
community now fighting it, but over time wise leaders like Jacob Harold
recognized that demonizing overhead crippled the ability of an organization to
build the capacity it needs to thrive. Minimizing overhead can be the economic
equivalent of anorexia—too few calories devoted to basic maintenance and an
organization can starve itself to death. (Or, at least, into perpetual
exhaustion.)

The immense respect I have for the Overhead Myth Campaign
made me perk up and take notice when Jacob Harold, CEO of Guidestar, tweeted a
link to a post by Vu Le titled Why
the Sustainability Myth is Just as Destructive as the Overhead Mython his blog Nonprofit With Balls (NWB). But reading Le’s
post just revived my doubts about whether social and cultural nonprofits are
fundamentally different in their basic economic underpinnings

Le, (who slyly insists the “balls” referred to in his blog title are the ones
we juggle as we try to keep a nonprofit afloat) first popped up on my radar as
a humor columnist for Blue Avocado,
an online magazine for community nonprofits. (Like this
post in which he imagines rewriting popular children’s books to be about
nonprofit work.) This irreverent approach shapes the post Harold tweeted about,
in which Le uses stories about a customer at a fictional “Happy Chicken” fast
food restaurant to illustrate how ridiculous it is for donors to care about the
sustainability of the organizations they support. He mockingly imagines a customer declaring “I
only eat at restaurants where I know they have a strong plan to diversify their
customer base so they can keep cooking after I have paid for my meal and am
gone.” Isn't this standard just as ridiculous for nonprofits as it is for for-profits?

“Many funders and donors seem to define “sustainability” as
“self-sufficiency,” writes Le, “and have this romantic notion of a world where
nonprofits don’t depend on them at all.”
After some thought, I disagree, at least for museums. For me, the current focus on sustainability is about making sure that a program into which an organization has
invested a lot of time, money, creativity, and communications bandwidth isn’t
going to disappear just because a particular funder shifts focus or a new
program officer comes on board. And it is entirely reasonable for me as a
donor, or funder, to want a fair amount of assurance that a museum has a long term
plan for supporting their core functions of “collect, preserve, interpret”
beyond “people will keep dumping money on us.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tracked down a great
program or service referenced in an article or session description,
only to hear “oh we discontinued that after [x] years, because the funding ran
out.” So yes, in the short term maybe the funders got what they wanted, but in the long term...there is no long term. Often there isn't even any permanent, accessible record of how the program was built and what we learned from it. There are legitimate reasons
to end a program—its charm depended on novelty; the problem the program
addressed was solved (best case, by the program itself); the needs of the
community changed. “It was great but we ran out of money” shouldn’t be one of
those reasons.

But fact is, many funders aren’t interested in becoming
step-parents. They are unlikely to adopt the wonderful projects started with
some other funder’s money. They want to put their imprimatur on something new
and shiny, something they can claim as their own.

That’s why I think museums should see grants and foundation
funding as investments—start-up cash to launch, test and refine programs that
are, yes, sustainable—that have a
plan for continuing their great work after the original influx of cash dries
up. Le concludes that “Sustainability is about making sure nonprofits are not
going to be dependent on funders forever,” which he sees as a chimerical goal.
I see sustainability as buffering programs, and organizations, from the vagaries
of trends in philanthropy, and ensuring that “found money” in the form of gifts
and grants, are invested in improvements that can be sustained over the long
term.

Here’s a museum example: Digitization of collections is all
the rage right now. Lots of grants being are being awarded to museums to digitize
their collections and get them up on the web. But once digitization becomes
routine, will foundations hand out grants to support this humdrum basic
function with the same abandon? Probably not any more often than they support the
purchase of basic archival storage materials, or pay the salaries of people
cataloging the collection. Which is to say, rarely or not at all. And (this thought
really worries me) who will fund migrating all those millions of digital files
to new platforms and formats over time? An inevitable need, totally necessary
and (I’m afraid) completely un-sexy. That’s why I believe museums need to
create sustainable income streams, including earned income, into their business
plan when they tackle digitization. That doesn’t necessarily mean charging
for access to digitizing collections. (As I discussed in TrendsWatch 2015,
museums would be well advised to jump onto the Open Data train.) But it does
mean having a plan that uses open digitized data to build audiences, connect
with new partners and (in the long run) generate revenue to support their own
existence.

I have no personal experienced with social service
nonprofits. Maybe Vu Le’s criticism is apt for organizations that deliver
essential services we ought to provide as part of the basic social contract:
food, shelter, medical care. Though as a citizen, I happen to
believe these essential services should be supported via my taxes, rather than
through depending on the largesse of a subset of the population that both cares and has disposable income. Given that this is not the case, what do I, as a
donor, expect from the nonprofits that step in where the government does not? Maybe
I don’t care whether the soup kitchen will be around next week—because I know
people have to get fed TONIGHT. But given the time, effort and money needed to
build a successful infrastructure for food (or housing, health care or legal
services) I might care after all. Why not invest my charitable dollars in a
nonprofit with a sustainability plan that makes it resilient to the ups and
downs of donor funding?

So my thought is, either the Sustainability Myth is real,
but distinguishes two branches of the nonprofit tree—cultural
and social nonprofits, or museums are
actually ahead of their social brethren in adapting to the new economic
realities of their shared nonprofit world.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

I never have enough time for long-form reading, but every
summer I queue up a few things and make time to dive into them. Preferably
sitting on the porch. With lemonade. And cats. Here are the next four on my
list—these summaries are based on the preliminary nosing around that led me to
conclude they were worth a long read. (All of these are available as free PDF
downloads via the links provided.)

Bounce
Forward: Urban Resilience in the Era of Climate Change. (The Island Press, 2015,
366 pp.) The Kresge Foundation is devoted to creating opportunities for
low-income communities, is keenly aware of the disproportionate impact climate
change will have on those vulnerable populations. So the foundation partnered
with Island Press on the Urban Resilience Project—a combination of literature
review, interviews with diverse experts and a convening of advisors to work out
a unifying framework. The resulting report presents a holistic framework for
creating resilient cities—adaptable systems for energy, transportation, food,
water and housing that can anticipate, plan for and mitigate the impact of
change.

Why Read This? The
principles of resilient design summarized in this report can help museums with their
own risk mitigation planning. I also hope it encourages staff to think about
how their museum can contribute to the resilience of its own community.

A
Visual History of the Future (UK Government Office for Science, 2014,142 pp).
This report was commissioned by the UK Government’s Foresight Future of Cities
Project. The authors did their best to make one of the coolest topics ever as
dry and academic as possible—maybe because they think it makes the report more
credible? But even slinging around terms like “dominant paradigm” and “heuristic
visualizations” can’t smother the awesomeness of the content. These drawings,
prints, paintings, screenshots from the past 100 years—by artists, film makers,
architects, futurists—deal with enduring challenges. See, for example, Studio
Linfors’ 2009 “Cloud Skippers,” a design for lifting housing away from coastal
disasters via helium balloons; or Oscar Newman’s 1969 proposal for burying
Manhattan to protect it from nuclear attack. If those seem too far out, you
might prefer Shimzu Corporation’s “Green Float” concept for floating cities
designed to be carbon-negative (carbon absorbing) in its operations.

Why Read This? The
point isn’t the realism or practicality of these visualizations (many are
surreal and totally impractical) but their ability to free up our thinking to
play with radically different ideas for urban planning. (As a bonus, the text
and images often reference futurist films and novels, which then go onto my reading/viewing
list.)

Eugene Henard, The Cities of the Future, 1911

Living
Tomorrow (Intel Corporation, 2015, 139 pp.) This is the latest installment
of submissions to The Future Powered by Fiction competition sponsored by Intel,
the Society for Science and the Public and ASU’s Center for Science and the
Imagination in 2014. (The challenge invited 13-25 year olds around the world to
contribute science fiction stories, essays, comics and videos.) This collection
presents eleven entries focusing on futures shaped by biological and environmental
challenges, a nice change from our usual monolithic focus on digital technology.
You can find the winning entries from the competition here, along
with an earlier anthology of additional entries (Dark Futures). Later this
summer Intel will release the final installment—Journeys through Time and
Space.

Why Read This? The
trends that provide the basis for these stories—manipulation of the human
genome, radical longevity, food scarcity and increasingly sophisticated pharmaceuticals—are
quite real. Stories on each of them pop up in my scanning on a regular basis,
(and often find their way into Dispatches
from the Future of Museums). These young authors help us imagine where
these trends may take us, before the consequences take us by surprise.

Certifying
Skill and Knowledge: 4 Scenarios on the Future of Credentials
(KnowledgeWorks Foundation, 2015, 17 pp.) I’ll read pretty much anything put
out by KnowledgeWorks, CFM’s sister organization that conducts forecasts around
education. As we explored in TrendsWatch2013, credentialing is a major barrier to the widespread adoption of some
of the most promising educational innovations. How do you prove to a college
that you are ready to matriculate even if you didn’t go to high school? How do
you convince an employer you have the skills and knowledge needed for a job
when much of your training drew on non-traditional sources? But slowly, slowly,
alternative methods of credentialing are gaining credibility. This forecast
looks at four potential futures: the baseline (business as usual with some
variation around the edges); two alternative futures (one dominated by
alternative credentialing, one in which technology tracks and catalogs all that
you do), and one wild card in which we can read the brain directly to measure
cognitive, social and emotional skills.

Why Read This? In
Building the Future of Education: Museumsand the Learning Ecosystem, we envision a future in which museums play a
major role in mainstream education, rather than being relegated to the edges as
“nice but not necessary” resources. This future is premised on finding ways of credentialing
that go beyond standardized testing, grades and transcripts, so museums have a
vested interest in helping to test and implement alternative systems.

Monday, May 18, 2015

Monday musings are my way of sharing brief, off-the-cuff thoughts about something I have read recently, both to help clarify my thinking an in the hopes of generating discussion and response. I give myself 15 minutes or so to jot down a summary of the article(s) stuck in my brain, and outline why I think they may be important.

Three recent articles are colliding in my brain:

First, coverage of Michelle Obama’s speech at the opening of the
new Whitney Museum, at which she said

“You
see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and
concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well,
that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes
from my neighborhood. In fact, I
guarantee you that right now, there are kids living less than a mile from here
who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this
museum. And growing up on the South Side
of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself.
So I know that feeling of not belonging in a place like this. And today, as First Lady, I know how that
feeling limits the horizons of far too many of our young people.” (Here is
the transcript
of the whole talk.)

Second, an
article on Blouin Art Info on “The
Price of Admission: The New Whitney and Museum Tickets in New York,” in
which Mostafa Heddaya does some nice work tracking the history of admission
fees at some major New York museums, and calculating change over time in real
dollars. (It blew me away to learn the Whitney charged $1 for admission in
1971, and the Met $1.75. Those prices are $22 and $25 respectively, today.) The
article profiled the views of a number of prominent arts leaders (including
Alliance Board Chair Kaywin Feldman) who advocate making admission to museums
free. ““Accessibility is our most important value here — the only way to be truly
accessible is to be free” Ms. Feldman is quoted, “When the price barriers are
moved people can make visiting a museum a regular habit.”

If
you just read these two articles together, your mind might make the logical
leap that it is financial barriers that suppress diversity in museum attendance.
If museums were free, we would be equally accessible to people from all
socioeconomic classes, right?

Well,
but. Here’s where the third article plays in, a long and thoughtful piece
titled “Why Don’t
They Come?” by Ian David Moss, Louise Geraghty, Clara Schuhmacher and Talia
Gibas at CreateEquity. (If you don’t follow their work, I recommend you do, starting
with this article.) Ian et al. mined data from the latest NEA Survey of Public
Participation in the Arts (as well as comparable studies from other countries),
the NEA analysis of data from the General Social Survey, and consumer spending
surveys. These various data sources look at arts participation and barriers to
participation, leisure time and use of leisure time, all parsed by socioeconomic
status.

Their conclusion? If every exhibit and performance in the US
could be attended for free, it would only bridge 7% of the gap in attendance between
rich and poor, and between those who attended college and those who did not.
Even eliminating transportation barriers leaves a chasm between arts
participation between people with low socioeconomic status (SAS) and the rest
of the population. This despite the fact that low-SAS people have more leisure
time, on average, than people with higher incomes and more education. So what
does keep low-SAS people away? “Lack of explicit interest is far and away the
dominant factor” the authors conclude. And what are they doing with the time
they don’t spend on arts-related activities? Watching TV—with hours spent on
the tube correlating with lack of expressed interest in attending exhibits or
performances.

Source: National Endowment for the Arts, “When Going Gets Tough”

Which leaves museums wondering, as the article asks, why low
SES individuals “just aren’t into us.” Perhaps because TV satisfies their
desire for content (in which case—deal with it. If we can’t provide a more
compelling experience than TV, it’s on us to up our game). But maybe in part
because going to museums, or not going to museums, is something deeply embedded
in self-image. The CreateEquity authors point to data showing that even within
the same income range, people who self-identify as middle or upper class are
much more likely to attend exhibits or performances than people who identify as
working class. So, back to Mrs. Obama’s remarks, many people may feel that museums
are just “not a place for me.” That’s a much harder barrier to tear down than
price. Free admission may well facilitate repeat visitation by non-members who
already fit our core demographic, which is also a good thing. The real economic
issue for museums that want their audiences to reflect the socioeconomic diversity
of our country, however, may not be abolishing admission fees but figuring out
how much we have to spend, and on what, to become institutions where people
feel they “belong.”

Friday, May 15, 2015

I've been mentioning Microsoft's HoloLens quite a bit in my speaking and writing--bur often I'm not sure I'm getting across what makes it so exciting.HoloLens is an example of what Barry Joseph has dubbed "Us/Here" technology--a way of sharing holographic augments to the space you are actually in. Or, as one of my more successful attempts at synopsing the technology: it lets you and other users all interact with the same imaginary object sitting in real space. See? Hard to describe.Until you get hold of a HoloLens to try for yourself (maybe CFM can snag one to share at next year's annual meeting!) the best way to understand its capabilities is to what videos. So that's your Futurist Friday assignment this week, watch this 2 minute video

And start thinking about the opportunities "Us/Here" technology presents both as a tool for museum staff to use in their jobs, and to enhance the ways visitors can interact with our "here." Me, it makes my imagination race...

Thursday, May 14, 2015

May I just say, for the record, that I love love love the AAM annual meeting staff. They do a glorious job each year of pulling off the near impossible—decamping for a distant city to host a few thousand of our besties, orchestrating content, transportation, signage, A/V, food, drink and the logistics of getting a couple hundred vendors in and out of a massive exhibit hall. They totally rock.

But I’m a futurist. However good something is now, I wake up every morning wondering how it might be different in the future. Maybe better, at least better suited for the world that exists in five, ten, twenty years. Almost certainly different, however much we love what we have now.

On the more mundane level, there are many forces disrupting the conventional model for conferences bit by bit. For example: Airbnb is eating into hotel room blocks, giving organizers less leverage to negotiate lower rates and few

er free rooms to assign staff (which helps keep costs down).

Perhaps most profoundly, digital communications, from email to social media, foster what Lonny Bunch, director of the National African American Museum of History and Culture, has dubbed “rump parliaments”—gatherings that spring up around the “official” agenda, taking advantage of the critical mass of people and energy that converge on the conference. My informal count of these independent offshoots tallies well over a dozen, from convenings organized by consulting and research firms such as the Museum Group and Reach Advisors to provide content and face time with their clients, to reunions like the one organized by the Getty Leadership Institute for its alumni.

In Atlanta last month, some of these rumpuses were small scale and informal. Elise Granata and Nina Simon created a LinkedIn Group (Hack Your Hello’s At AAM) to facilitate connections between any size group of people with shared interests—one organizational step up from “we had this great spontaneous conversation in the bar last night.” At the other end of the spectrum, a “diverse group of emerging museum professionals” used Facebook and Twitter to flash-organize a gathering of over 70 people Tuesday night at Atlanta’s Ger Art museum to discuss labor issues in museums. (Here’s a resource list they compiled in case you, like I, regret missing their alt conf.)

I’m particularly interested in how social media empowers…well, anyone, to circumvent the limitations imposed by the formal selection process. Those limitations include both volume and timeliness. The National Program Committee has to winnow proposals down to a manageable number, which means many great ideas don’t make it onto the program. And since the call for proposals closes the previous fall, there’s no easy way for the meeting to respond to “of the moment” issues. However, folks engaged in #MuseumWorkersSpeak used their self-organized platform to promote discussion about #MuseumsRespondtoFerguson, and Baltimore, and other recent incidents inciting concern about justice and equity.

Most museum conferences today are hybrids of academic gatherings and trade shows. This creates so many tensions: between the established leadership that controls who gets on the program and emerging voices who don’t want to wait in line for their turn to present; between some people who view vendors as inherently suspect sources of information, and exhibitors who want to contribute content on an equal footing; between people looking for basic “101” sessions and people only interested in cutting edge ideas; and, frankly, between conference organizers trying to exert some measure of control over this unwieldy beast, and people who want to “hack the conference” (in the best, creative sense of the word) to create additional good.

I wonder if, in the future, these tensions aren’t going to fragment the conference as we know it into separate, independently viable pieces. Some possible forms I can imagine conferences taking in the future:

Mega “unconferences,” where organizers line up the space, housing, and supporting services, but rather than curating the content via a central program committee, concentrate on enabling attendees to self-organize in a multitude of ways (as illustrated above) to claim space, attract like-minded individuals and tackle topics of interest in ways that might range from presentations to working groups to workshops. Staff become air traffic controllers, tracking who is doing what, finding space on the fly, helping everybody find an appropriate seat.

Conferences whose central and explicit purpose is networking via social events. I have friends who attend the AAM conference to hang out with folks in the evening and tour the local museums during the day—some don’t even register (they have the grace to be slightly embarrassed, when they admit that to me), others register but don’t attend sessions. There are so many places to find high quality content now—ranging from local convenings to videos, webinars, blogs and web archives of papers. Why listen to someone read a paper when you could be brainstorming with folks you only see once a year?

A distributed model, where the role of the national/central association is to create high-quality core content that is beamed out to satellite site that host local convenings. Local organizers build tailored on-site content to supplement the live-streamed events, and participants at all the distributed sites can interact over the share content in chat rooms and via social media.

I confess I pulled a little futurist sleight-of-hand there, characterizing this as the future. Fact is, all these things are happening, at least a little bit, now. And they are not entirely under the control of the organizations that run the official conferences. The question facing the Alliance, as well as the regional, state and discipline-specific associations, is how we will choose adapt to these changes, and take charge of our own futures before it gets reinvented for us. And the question for you (feel free to share your thoughts via comments, below) is what kind of conference you want, in the future.

Here are some summaries and analysis of #AAM2015, including the non-official events, that have appeared on the web. Insight into what people found memorable and rewarding!Rogue Sessions and Conversations: Thoughts on AAM 2015 in Atlanta by Paul Orselli on ExhibiTricks blog. Paul shares his frustration with our "big and unwieldy" event, while celebrating the great conversations he had "most of which happened outside the confines of formal conference session." As I said... Museums as Change Agents? The AAM Meeting and Expo 2015 From Clara Rice, of Jack Rouse Associates, on BlooloopReflecting on AAM on the Incluseum, in which Rose Paquet Kinsley talks about how she and a co-presenter reworked their session on inclusive language and social value 2 hours before they went on stage, in order to respond to what they had heard of the conference so far. [Applause.] AAM Conference: Atlanta, GA from NewProject Think & Build

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

If you joined us for the annual meeting in Atlanta, you may have seen the queue in MuseumExpo for a small gallery plopped down in the midst of the hall. Working the line of folks waiting to don a bright blue, neon orange or distinguished black pair of Google Glass was Sylvea Hollis, project manager for CFM’s “Museum of the Future.” I’m lucky to have recruited Sylvea to assist with futuring while she finishes her PhD. at the University of Iowa in the History Department. (She has her Masters in History Museum Studiesfrom the Cooperstown Graduate Program and worked on various curatorial and education projects with museums ranging from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to the St. Eustatius Historical Foundation in the Caribbean.) You can follow her on Twitter @sil_ve_uh (which also tells you how to pronounce her name J.)

On Monday, April 27th, The Museum of the Future opened as a mock-gallery created by the Center for the Future of Museums at the AAM Annual Meeting 2015. The project highlighted one of CFM’s most discussed trends in the field this year—wearable technology.

Professionals and people employed in industries that support museums came to try on Google Glass and follow a GuidiGO tour, that consisted of mini-exhibitions from six different museums (Computer History Museum, High Museum of Art, Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Atlanta History Center, and the Atlanta Botanical Garden). While watching the first line form, I could not help but think of the field’s transformation from Charles Wilson Peale-styled cabinets of curiosity to pop-up galleries with art, history, and flora.

The Museum of the Future was but one example of our shift from places where visitors are told what matters most, to institutions that value everyday stories, and create space for people to enter on their own terms. Technology can help to enhance our work, but it is not a panacea. Hundreds of people stopped by and most wanted to talk about finding meaningful ways to be innovative while remaining true to their mission. I believe that the opportunities are endless. For example, technology has the potential to be a great way to help museum professionals reach new audiences, create more conversations in galleries, preserve collections, and forge diverse partnerships like in the often discussed STEM and humanities.

CFM Director Elizabeth Merritt outlined plans for the Museum of the Future in a previous blog post. She posed three primary questions:

What roles can wearable technology play in the museum of the future?

What could wearable tech do differently or better than handheld devices?

What are the “killer applications” for Google Glass or other wearable tech in museums, for visitors or behind the scenes?

We gauged visitor response mostly through conversations with people entering and leaving the gallery. Additionally, people were invited to leave comments on post-its and/or via Twitter (#cfmwearables15). Most people were thrilled by the opportunity to wear Google Glass and try out GuidiGO’s tour within the museum-styled exhibit. Their enthusiasm was reflected not only in their conversations, but also in their body language. Many had a wide gaze while reading the exhibition statement and a posture that leaned in toward the entrance. I noticed open hands and strangers talking about their institutions while in line. For me, these cues pointed to visitor’s desire to stay connected to people and place their work—education, curatorial, and or design—at the center of the experience. I believe that the future of the field’s relationship to technology and innovation can be found in type of conversations people held while in line.

Visitors had questions about the design, use, and personal privacy. But, most of their discussions concerned ways to honor the objects without letting new gadgets a focal point. There were also questions about accessibility. Some wondered if Glass would ever create a version for left-eye dominant people or that could be used wholly through voice activation. Of the things that visitors liked, many shared that they loved being able to move through a gallery on their own terms, having hands free, being able to talk with others, and knowing that they could craft tours for their own institutions using similar software.

Final Thoughts: It isn’t just cutting edge, it’s bleeding edge…

There may be questions of how Google Glass and other forms of wearables will be used in the future, but there is no question of if they will be around. The potential benefits are far too great to ignore. Which types of wearables will exist in the future and their most popular use remain unknown. For the two and a half days that the mock-gallery was on display, museums stood at the forefront of innovation. We are not the only industry facing the technology question. But, the steps that hundreds made as they entered the Museum of the Future marked what I believe is an important move in the right direction.

This project would not have been possible without an amazing team. A big thank you to:

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

One of the best things about attending the
annual AAM meeting is the serendipitous networking that takes place 24/7. For
example, as I ran from event to event one evening, I connected for just a
nanosecond with Carl Hamm, deputy director for development and external affairs
at the Saint Louis Art Museum. That jogged his memory about a
guest post he was writing for CFM, inspiring him to polish it up when he got
back from Atlanta. Carl is one of my go-to colleagues for analysis on trends in
philanthropy, and I'm pleased to share this installment of his ongoing commentary on museum funding. Given
the debate, at the conference, about ethics,
donors and influence, I will add some questions for your consideration: if,
as Carl projects, museums become even more dependent on a small, affluent pool
of supporters, will the politics, policies and positions of these donors
influence our own agendas? If those agenda's conflict with a museum's mission or goals, how do we brace ourselves to say "no" to much needed cash, or protect our credibility if we accept the funding? Even in the best cases, where a donor's influence reinforces the museum's own values, how do we avoid becoming disconnected from the opinions and needs of our audiences, if they don't wield the power of the purse?

Three years ago, the museum field was abuzz with notions
that crowd funding would become a major source of funding for museums, fear that
the 1% would exercise inappropriate influence, and the idea that the charitable
deduction disproportionately benefits the rich.

In that context, I wrote a
blog for the Center in 2012 distinguishing ‘funding’ from ‘giving’ and suggesting
that, for the foreseeable future, museums should still focus their emphasis on raising
major gifts from individual donors and families as the primary effort of their sustainable
fund raising programs.

Reflecting on several pieces of disparate but connectable
data over the past several months, it seemed time to revisit my earlier
thoughts. Have changes in the world over
the past three years suggested that more populist giving strategies for museums
might be imminent, or prudent as a primary strategy?

If anything, it seems to me that the future of charitable
giving for museums is likely to be even more
reliant on major gift philanthropy than it was three years ago.

In January, Oxfam
released a study reporting that the richest 1% of people in the world now holds
48% of the world’s wealth and, if current trends hold, by 2016 this group will own
more wealth than the remaining 99% of people on the planet.

Oxfam’s point, and the recommendation of their study, is
their belief that governments should implement policies to “redistribute money
and power from the few to the many.” But wouldn’t this data also suggest that,
as soon as next year, even fewer individuals and families will control the
majority of resources available for discretionary charitable giving?

According to The
Philanthropy Outlook for 2015 & 2016 published in February by the Lilly
School and presented by Marts & Lundy,
the percentage of giving by those who itemize deductions on their tax returns
is expected to grow by 6% in both 2015 and 2016; yet giving by those who don’t itemize
is predicted to drop to less than 10% of overall giving. This represents a
significant shift: for more than two decades, non-itemizers’ gifts have
represented some 15-20% of giving in America.

On the heels of this year’s rejuvenating AAM annual meeting in
Atlanta, I am reminded of the breadth and diversity among the types and sizes
of museums in our country, and that so many of our wonderful smaller museums are
located outside major metropolitan areas, far from the billionaire donors whose
gifts tend to populate daily headlines in the mainstream and philanthropic
press.

Three years ago, I suggested that museums should continue to
diversify their revenue mix as part of an overall, comprehensive funding strategy;
developing innovative, entrepreneurial strategies for earned revenue; continually
broadening their base of philanthropic supporters with an eye toward the future;
and adopting new fund raising tactics appropriate for their institutions – such
as the
Freer-Sackler’s successful crowdfunding initiative for its Yoga exhibition in 2013.

The undeniable shifts in wealth distribution in our country and
trends in giving among high net worth households underscore for me the
fundamental reality that the giving relationships museums develop with
individuals and families of means in our communities are vital to our financial
sustainability, today and for the future.
Sponsorships, grants and other singular funding opportunities are important
for revenue in the short term, but companies, foundations and government
programs don’t leave bequests or priceless art collections to their favorite
museums when they are merged or dissolved!

The next
generation will behave and respond much differently than their parents and
grandparents, and engaging them in philanthropy will present its own set of
challenges. But I believe that it will be
even more important in the years to
come for museums to actively develop authentic, lifelong relationships with specific
individuals and families who share the institution’s values and are committed
to its present and perpetual success – especially those who have the
discretionary resources to transform a museum’s potential through their engagement
and generosity.

In cities and the heartland, in museums large and small, the
data pointing to the future of sustainable charitable giving seems pretty black
and white to me. Or is it green?